The EU Parliament has taken a stand for privacy | Proton
The EU Parliament has taken a stand for privacy | Proton
MEPs in the European Parliament held press conferences outlining the compromises reached within the EU Parliament negotiators on the controversial Chat Control proposal.
On Thursday October 26th, MEPs in the European Parliament held press conferences outlining the compromises reached within the EU Parliament negotiators on the controversial Chat Control proposal.
Thankfully it appears that progress is being made in the fight to preserve privacy. According to MEPs, Parliamentarians have agreed to remove the clauses that would give law enforcement the power to demand end-to-end encrypted platforms hand over users messages, emails, and files as part of criminal investigations.
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While this is good news, the fight for privacy in the digital age will never end. They will continue to take small bites until they have the entire pie. Unfortunately we never (or rarely) regain any digital right to privacy that has been taken in the past. The best we can do is halt the further erosion of our digital privacy through vigilance, education and protest.
Personally I see it as an arms race. As they take away privacy I ramp up my use of privacy protection.
Whether that's by using encrypted comms, VPNs, browser plugins or settings.
For example I regularly use Mullvad. I recently installed Adguard Home on my OpenWRT router to block trackers. I have uBlock on my browser and may be switching to Firefox soon too.
those are all things only ubernerds are doing.
we need deeper protections than that because they dont even have to make privacy impossible, just annoying for 99% of normies.
Also, when everyone else in your life isn't private, neither are you.
Unfortunately we all laugh at the meme of being on death row for running an blocker in the future but it sure feels that way some days.
Like everywhere, it's a constant fight for our rights, for they don't erode away.
Just why is that so? What does the eroding?
Capitalism and Democracy.
Capitalism because for many corporations there is monetary value in removing the privacy of citizens, this is in fact the main business model for corporate groups like Alphabet and Meta.
Democracy because it's easier to get votes by telling people that you want to protect them from the bad ones and need to find the bad ones and that the people with nothing to hide have nothing to fear, than to tell them the truth: Control is an illusion, there can be no absolute safety, existing in a free nation will always be a balance act between protecting citizens versus protecting citizens rights and there are no easy answers to complex problems like crime or terrorism.